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Musings
Our Personal Mission Statements
Making preparations for enhancing our chances of living life to the fullest
October 03, 2006

Many of us have worked on mission statements for organizations, clubs and businesses without ever considering the importance of having a personal mission statement.

What do I want from life?
What do I need to relinquish in order to focus on my true purpose?
What is my spiritual destiny?

A four-year old will readily announce his determination to be a “fireman” or to be the president. Pre-teens’ will have their idea of a destiny all laid out, but after that we begin to lose our way as we experience life’s uncertainties: plans gone awry, confrontations with brick walls and issues beyond our ability to control.

Life’s uncertainties are the reason we need a personal mission statement clearly defined--one that deals with the true purpose of our living instead of the goals we expect to achieve. It fortifies us as we move through uncertain times. If we have looked deeply within, have spent enough time listening for guidance from the Spirit, we have built a firm foundation upon which to stand while everything around us comes tumbling down.

Knowing what path places us firmly within God’s plan, defining our personal place in God’s plan, and having faith that He will move us forward in that plan gives us the courage and stamina to keep moving...no matter what curve balls are tossed our way!

Brian Tinkler has developed many mission statements, including a Personal Mission Statement, Family Mission Statement, Career Mission Statement, Friendship Mission Statement, Community Mission Statement, and Spiritual Mission Statement.

His spiritual mission statement reads:

"I will strive to understand God's wisdom and ways. I will search for God's handiwork in all I enjoy in life - myself, my family, my work, my friends, and my community. I will search to understand God's plan and to teach it to others. I believe I will have the blessings of God for this earnest pursuit, and that these blessings will lead to new and exciting opportunities, experiences, and successes on my road to eternal happiness."

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Rants
Speed-dating Religion
No need to delay choosing a religion because of time constraints since speed-dating has arrived
October 06, 2006

I had to pass along this exciting new opportunity to maintain a religious connection without having to drop anything else from one's hectic schedule. It's the answer for all those who need to feel connected but are too busy to give serious time to the development of a real relationship with God.

A speed-dating service to help find the church of one's dreams, where representatives of churches will meet potential converts, is the newest innovation of the Church of England. Each church rep will have five minutes with each of the event attendees, one to one, to try to sell them their particular place of worship and brand of Christianity. The event is aimed at young people toying with returning to church but too busy to find one that suits them.

The Bishop of Swindon said the event would give people "a chance to see if there is any chemistry between them and a church". --Speed-daters may find the church of lost dreams, by Jonathan Petre

I wonder if the leaders of these churches have read the King James Version of the Bible, "So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth." --Revelation 3:16

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Teachings
First Choice
Is our future one of free will or is it preordained
October 09, 2006

Many believe that God granted us free will and that we have a choice in the direction of our life. Others believe everything is preordained from before the time of our arrival on planet Earth.

I vote for neither. I believe it is a combination of the two.

Looking back upon my life in the place and time it has been lived, brings me to the conclusion that I am a very ordinary person. Extrapolating from that position, I conclude my experiences, my life lessons, are both ordinary and commonplace.

I believe the only thing "preordained" is God's prior knowledge of the choices we will make and that is not the same as prior determination of our story. I believe we have the free choice of choosing to be part of God's family or choosing to turn our back on Him. All choices available to us after that spring from this first decision.

Choosing to reject God places us in the position of being on our own with nothing greater than our own wits to guide and protect us.

Choosing to join God's family is a permanent choice. God is not into divorce or abandonment. Sadly, we often times turn our back on His love and decide we really want to go it on our own. Can we? I think not. No matter what we do, the choice to be a part of His family cannot be reversed, everything from that point forward precipitates from this First Choice.

I came into adulthood as a child of God and later on when I got too full of myself and forgot about Him, I was allowed to see the ugliness in this world. It is an ugliness from which He chooses to protect His children. Had he abandoned me? No, He was there, patiently watching, practicing "tough love".

When the hard lessons brought me back to reality, I went looking for Him and He was there ready to love me and take care of me as He had always wanted to do.

I am so grateful for The First Choice.

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Musings
Going to Hell Anyway--NOT!
Nothing is impossible with God
October 12, 2006

She would be joining the ranks of the homeless today were it not for her sister's home. The day her house could no longer be reclaimed by paying the back taxes had arrived. The new owner had made a visit to the house--and she watched from a distance. In her pocket was the Power of Attorney sent to her husband at the State Hospital. It had come in the mail while she watched. Her husband had signed it giving her permission to sell the house, but it was too late, and it was not notarized. The State Hospital did not make a notary public available to him.

It was the day she had long plotted to end her own life because she did not know how to go on. It was the day the love with which she had been surrounded in recent days would be tested. Would the prayers, the smiles and embraces of family and friends, sustain her through this day and the days to come as she watched the house from her sister's home next door.

After the new people had left the house, she surrendered her sorrow to the task of removing her remaining personal possessions. A neighbor across the street offered to buy the antique table and buffet plus the upright piano. Another neighbor got the dog house while a young couple just starting out were thrilled with the washer and dryer. First to be moved were the really heavy items. When we got to the upright piano, we had lots of onlookers but only one man joined the four women in the task. After we succeeded in sliding the piano down the front steps, a car was backed up to the piano and it was towed across the street. One person got pictures on their cell phone--as if we needed a picture to remember herding a piano across a busy city street!

Sometime during all the action, she leaned toward me and said something about having to feed the homeless later this week. Only God knows how deeply those few words went into my spirit and how far they expanded within me. Then I paused and I just looked at the scene. She had inadvertently achieved what seemed so impossible--long established homeowners were in the street visiting with the transient newcomers.

Only God, only God could have accomplished this!!

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Teachings
Other Perspectives
The impulse to straighten out someone's "stinking thinking"
October 15, 2006

I have lived places where I tended to be surrounded by people who were somewhat like me. Opinions about various subjects might differ, but basically we were similar enough to be able to understand each other's values and experiences. I now live in an environment where value systems and methodology by which conclusions are drawn, are completely alien and totally baffling for me.

Do I have an occasional impulse to straighten out someone's "stinking thinking"? I'm human, aren't I?

Last week I had the opportunity to hear a social worker, who had been born into the community but had been away for many years, explain the history which influenced the residents to adopt their unique value systems. You know something? I'd be just like them had I grown up in a community where the various power brokers delighted in jerking their constituents around like puppets on a string.

When I listen to people who've never had materials things expound upon those who have much, I am impressed by how little they understand the more affluent lifestyle and its pitfalls. In the same way, I am sickened by the callousness of those who have had an easy path toward the people who have to struggle continually.

Life becomes so much richer when we have walked the paths of those from all levels of society. This kind of intimate knowledge is the great leveler and greatly reduces the temptation to take an adversarial stance with anyone.

"When you are interested in other perspectives, it doesn't imply, even slightly, that you're advocating them. I certainly wouldn't choose a punk rock lifestyle or suggest it to anyone else. At the same time, however, it's really not my place to judge it either. One of the cardinal rules of joyful living is that judging others takes a great deal of energy and, without exception, pulls you away from where you want to be." --Richard Carlson

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Musings
Worldliness
Did I Get it Right This Time?
October 18, 2006

When I was young, wearing anything denim meant social isolation--it was the kiss of death! Everett was the only kid in my eighth grade class wearing denim and to make matters even worse, he wore the same pair of bib overalls every day!

I look back with such regret over my own shallowness--if only I could have the opportunity to give Everett a smile and a warm 'hello'. I try to remember something Everett might have done to offend any of his classmates and earn our scorn. All I can remember is his lopsided grin and attitude of resignation.

Everett was really cool and we were too stupid to recognize his special qualities. No matter what we did to him--no matter how cruel our jokes, he took everything in stride and hid his hurt behind that crooked smile. Through high school Everett remained an outcast and after graduation was quickly forgotten as the unimportant person we had judged him.

Today the man I've called "Everett", has undoubtedly become the most honored member of our class.

We get so wrapped up in becoming a clone of the cultural dictates of the day, we lose our own identity and with it, our character:

"...the anguished concern to keep up with an ever-changing, complex, and fictitious orthodoxy in taste, in politics, in cult, in belief, in theology and what not, cultivation of the ability to redefine one's identity day by day in concert with the self-definition of society. ‘Worldliness’ in my mind is typified by this kind of servitude to care and to illusion, this agitation about thinking the right thoughts and wearing the right hats, this crude and shameful concern not with truth but only with vogue. To my mind, the concern of Christians to be in fashion lest they ‘lose the world’ is only another pitiable admission that they have lost it." --Thomas Merton

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Meditations
Enlarge My Territory
What does enlarge my territory really mean
October 21, 2006

Since Bruce H. Wilkinson's book, The Prayer of Jabez: Breaking Through to the Blessed Life, hit the best-seller list some years back, it has been used as a basis for demanding prosperity be showered upon Christians. But what does it really mean, and how can I be sure which of many interpretations best fit God's intended meaning? I've stumbled over this many times and have never been comfortable with anything I've been told. Today I have been given an answer.

A man who has been given the label "strange" by his associates visited with me today. He spends a lot of time with God and is sincere in his desire to be a loving son of the Heavenly Father. The many drugs he must take for his physical condition have been interpreted as mind-altering, leaving his messages from God suspect in the mind of his worldly associates. I do not know him well and needed to know whether to trust his messages.

This morning he was speaking of something the Holy Spirit had revealed about his future. For a long moment he hesitated like he'd lost his train of thought. During his hesitation, into my mind came "enlarge my territory" and what is its true meaning along with an answer that has nothing to do with prosperity. After he finished what he was saying, I asked him "what does enlarge my territory really mean to you." He rolled his eyes. He didn't want to answer because God had given him an understanding that did not fit with what all the preachers were saying.

I waited.

So he answered that 'enlarge my territory' means to increase my responsibilities in the work of the Kingdom.

Bingo, that's what I'd just been told. Now I know I must trust him.

"I will drive out nations before you and enlarge your territory, and no one will covet your land when you go up three times each year to appear before the LORD your God." --Exodus 34:24 (NIV)

"When the LORD your God has enlarged your territory as he promised you, and you crave meat and say, "I would like some meat," then you may eat as much of it as you want." --Deuteronomy 12:20 (NIV)

"If the LORD your God enlarges your territory, as he promised on oath to your forefathers, and gives you the whole land he promised them, because you carefully follow all these laws I command you today—to love the LORD your God and to walk always in his ways—then you are to set aside three more cities. Do this so that innocent blood will not be shed in your land, which the LORD your God is giving you as your inheritance, and so that you will not be guilty of bloodshed." --Deuteronomy 19:8-10 (NIV)

and this verse is the basis for the book:
"Jabez cried out to the God of Israel, "Oh, that you would bless me and enlarge my territory! Let your hand be with me, and keep me from harm so that I will be free from pain." And God granted his request." --1 Chronicles 4:10 (NIV)

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Meditations
In the Silence
The paradoxical answer to loneliness is aloneness
October 24, 2006

She's alone: frightened by the vast emptiness that consumes her spirit, rung dry by the wreckage of her life, staring into a bleak future. Her mind frantically races as it gropes for something--anything--to hold on to and there's nothing she can see in the darkness.

She laughs: not in joy, but in agony. Someone is trying to tell her about Jesus. At a time like this, what's Jesus got to do with anything. She needs someone to hold her, someone to love her, someone to take care of her. She is not interested in something or someone she cannot see, touch, feel.

She sits alone; she sits in the silence. She feels as though she's turned to stone and thinks it would be a relief for that to be true; stones do not feel.

We must weep for her and we must ask God's support for her and pray the light shine into the dark recesses of her bewilderment until she can understand the truth of what Tim Hansel is saying, "If I want to heal the ache and loneliness in my own life, one of the things I need to do is get away alone with God. The paradoxical “answer” to loneliness is aloneness . . . with God. In the silence God will speak to you most powerfully. Too often his words to us get muffled, lost, or covered by the crowd of many noises both inside and outside of us. We must have a quiet heart in order to hear God’s distinctive message to us."

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Musings
Losing the Real Purpose
To be unknowingly used as messengers of the Most High
October 27, 2006

My years of peaceful solitude are being interrupted by busy-ness. It is busy-ness with merit in that I am filling my hours with tasks benefitting my community.

"So, what's the problem?" you ask.

"Being tuned in to God's guidance", is the answer.

I sense a distance as though my most intimate friend is away on a trip. It does not seem as though anything's wrong, it just seems like someone I'm used to having close by has now moved farther away. This does not make me happy. I want that sense of closeness, I want it to be so close it is touching--embracing--my spirit. I do not know a way to experience that closeness other than spending time in peaceful solitude waiting upon my Lord's visits.

"We understand that ordinary people are messengers of the Most High. They go about their tasks in holy anonymity, often even unknown to themselves. Yet, if they had not been there, if they had not said what they said or did what they did, it would not be the way it is now. We would not be the way we are now. Never forget that you too yourself may be a messenger." --Lawrence Kushner

And, so it is that we ordinary people need to maintain the spiritual closeness necessary to allow ourselves to be unknowingly used as messengers of the Most High for, in actuality, our only function here is to keep the closeness.

My prayer for you, me and everyone is that many moments of peaceful solitude, moments of mindlessness, accompany each day.

Yes, a work-a-holic just endorsed something the world might describe as "laziness".

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Teachings
God's Whisperings
How do you tell when God is speaking to you
October 30, 2006

The grave expression on her face was my first clue as to the depth of the question she was pondering. Only a first grader, this is the week she must face the man in court who 'hurt' her last summer. Life is heavy upon her frail shoulders but her steady gaze speaks of her strong constitution.

As her eyes penetrated my very being, she said, "How do you tell when God is speaking to you."

This was not going to be a time to use any of the pat little phrases we've been taught in church. This was a time to speak with a boldness that matched the boldness in the child's eyes.

I told her God speaks to us in many ways although I did not remember having been spoken with prior to my asking to be a part of his family. She smirked. I gave her a big grin and continued to speak of things coming to me from near my heart where my spirit resides instead of from my head; of the fact they were unique thoughts which had never crossed my path before; of the fact it seemed as though words were being spoken from within my spirit even though I was not hearing them with my ears.

She liked the answer but wanted to know if there were more ways God spoke to me and I acknowledged there were many ways God speaks to his children; that He knows where to find you and will use the channels which you frequent. I gave examples of my working on the web and receiving so much insight through that work. I told her about the spirit doing 'flip-flops' inside me when I read something which was intended as a message from God. I explained the importance of knowing what the Bible says so we can be certain the message we are receiving could have come from God.

"There is hardly ever a complete silence in our soul. God is whispering to us well nigh incessantly. Whenever the sounds of the world die out in the soul, or sink low, then we hear these whisperings of God. He is always whispering to us, only we do not always hear, because of the noise, hurry, and distraction which life causes as it rushes on." --Frederick W. Faber

"Your persistent longing is your persistent voice. But when love grows cold, the heart grows silent. Burning love is the outcry of the heart! If you are filled with longing all the time, you will keep crying out, and if your love perseveres, your cry will be heard without fail." --St. Augustine

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